He wanted to argue but it would be useless. He wondered if it would always be this way. She didn’t mean to smother, anymore than their mother did. It just ran in the family. Like wooden legs, his Opa Nagl might say.

The thought of his irreverent grandfather brought him some relief from the gloom now pressing down on him. The same Opa Nagl had a saying for everything, from genetics to stupidity. He held the farm still, even though it was only admitted recently that Theo, the eldest, would not return to farm at all. Opa Nagl had been philosophical: well, why would a tool-and-die man want to come back to farming? It had been leased out the next year.

Felix took two mints and walked with Lisi to the gate, his mind still on his grandfather. A short man, was Opa Nagl, and a huber bauer through and through, a real farmer, a countryman forever. Too young himself to be directly mauled by the war, he was almost proud to still remember some Russian curse-words he had picked up from playing with the occupiers who’d taken over here. Opa Nagl had farmed ambitiously, got drunk several times a year, and voted Sozi. This was even if he despised a leader of the same Social Democratic Party. He had a saying to paper over any inconsistency. How many times had Felix heard over the years from Opa Nagl that he’d prefer to be wrong with the Sozis than right with the brownshirt bastards in the Freedom Party?

As funny as his Opa could be, he was no pushover, however.

Felix still remembered how Opa Nagl got his message across years ago. It had been when Felix had snuck through the yard and then up the pastures to throw clods of earth at the cows. The bells had been heard back at the farm. When he returned, there was Opa holding out a brush. It had been a monstrous brush, twice the size of the nine-year-old hellion Felix. Cleaning the farmyard something Felix had never seen done before, and never again had taken until abendessen.